Uyghurs tortured in camps: ex-officer

‘PSYCHOPATHS’

A former Chinese policeman said Uyghur Muslims were hanged from cell ceilings, tortured with electric batons and ordered to be raped by fellow prisoners, in what appears to be the first interview with an official whistleblower.

The former detective described the extreme abuse Uyghurs were subjected to in order to elicit confessions as China rounded up about two million people in a social cleansing program.

The exile’s testimony in a CNN interview from somewhere in Europe, builds on growing evidence of the system of Uyghur detention and internment that the U.S. has said amounts to “genocide.”

The Daily Telegraph could not independently verify his identity, but the interview jibes with similar witness statements given by Uyghurs in exile.

The officer, identified only by the surname Jiang, said he worked in one of the hundred internment camps. He said that initially he felt the patriotic pull to join 150,000 police recruits to staff detention centres in Xinjiang but he was quickly disillusioned by rampant abuse carried out against detainees as young as 14.

Jiang said every new detainee was beaten during their initial interrogation to extract a “confession” and often subject to abuse like China’s infamous “tiger chair,” which straps a subject’s hands and feet to a chair sometimes for days, as well as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and hanging from ceilings.

Jiang said he and his colleagues would “kick them, beat them (until they’re) bruised and swollen” and “until they kneel on the floor crying.”

“If you want people to confess, you use the electric baton with two sharp tips on top,” he also said in the interview. “We would tie two electrical wires on the tips and set the wires on their genitals while the person is tied up.”

Other tactics, he said, included forcing prisoners to gang-rape male detainees. He now believes, however, none of the detainees was guilty and many appeared to have been arrested simply to fill government quotas.

Following a confession, inmates would be sent to one of China’s hundreds of internment camps, referred to as “vocational training” centres.

Jiang told CNN some of his colleagues saw their work as another job in police or public security but others were “just psychopaths.”

Jiang appears to be the first public whistleblower from China’s ethnic Han majority to testify about conditions in detention centres.

Uyghur exiles have spoken to international media and U.S. congressional hearings about similar abuse.

An estimated two million Muslim Uyghurs have been sent to internment camps in Xinjiang since 2017.

Beijing continues to deny claims from foreign governments of abuse and genocide in Xinjiang, which it has called “slanderous.”